In a plant of the type here considered, it is customary to place the roving-laden bobbins at the preparatory stage on a carriage for transportation to an associated spinning machine. There, an operator will lift an oncoming bobbin out of the carriage and either position it directly on the supply rack, as a replacement for an exhausted active bobbin, or store it temporarily in an adjacent area. While the circulation of a bobbin-transporting carriage between a roving frame of the preparatory stage and a given spinning machine can be automatically controlled, the removal of the arriving replacement bobbins from the carriage and their assignment to a working position in need thereof--with or without interim storage--is still a labor-intensive operation and correspondingly uneconomical.